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What do the Dead Sea Scrolls really mean?

Sixty years after they were pulled from caves in the Middle Eastern desert, it's time we started taking the Dead Sea Scrolls more seriously, says the coordinator of a major conference on the archaeological find.

Sixty years after they were pulled from caves in the Middle Eastern desert, it's time we started taking the Dead Sea Scrolls more seriously, says the coordinator of a major conference on the archaeological find.

Hindy Najman, director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto, says work on the scrolls has, until now, largely focused on the "vitally important" job of cataloguing the scrolls and translating them into modern languages.

"But now that they're here, how are we going to understand them?" Najman asks.

Her answer was a four-day conference on interpreting the scrolls that opened Sunday at the Royal Ontario Museum, where the scrolls are on display until January. The conference closes Wednesday. "These are the best people in the world," says Najman of the scholars from across North America, Europe and Israel at the conference. "They were all hand-picked to be here."

Having the scrolls on display offered a unique opportunity to attract the world's top experts to Toronto and exchange ideas about what can be learned from them, says Najman, who worked with McMaster University to put on the event.

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The 2,000-year-old scrolls, the oldest known copies of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, date from a time of great religious turmoil with the rise of both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

Now that we know what was in the caves, and for the most part what the scrolls say, Najman is eager to get the academic discussion moving onto the next phase of debating what it all means.

Not that it's strictly academic. The scrolls still capture the public imagination, she says, so public lectures were held on the conference's two opening nights. Wednesday morning, Grade 11 students from the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto are to attend.

"They all study the scrolls in Grade 10" as part of their Jewish history lessons, says Paul Shaviv, director of education at CHAT.

Going to the conference will allow the students, who are this year studying ancient history, to better understand the scrolls and to gain insight into the scholarly life as a career option, he says. The curator of the ROM show, Risa Levitt Kohn, is a graduate of CHAT.

Harvard professor James Kugel, a speaker at the conference, says the scrolls offer valuable insight into our own approach to Biblical text.

For instance, he says, it is clear from the scrolls that even as the Hebrew Bible was being written down, the texts were being interpreted in many different ways.

"We tend to think that the Bible came first, and then the interpretation," he says.

The language of the scrolls, however, shows that the writing and interpretation came simultaneously, and even influenced one another, says Kugel, author of How to Read the Bible. "These were people with an axe to grind," he says, "and yet, some of their interpretations became the accepted truth."

Knowing that makes it easier to accept modern efforts to interpret the Bible, he says.

"It's what we've always done."

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